Possible 2021 Ford Bronco exterior paint palette leaks

The Bronco6G forum paid a visit to the Automotive Touchup website and came away with the color palette — or at least part of it — for the 2021 Ford Bronco. Automotive Touchup, in the process of advertising colors to repair that paint on a new Bronco, listed ten hues "custom mixed to perfectly match the color of your 2021 Ford Bronco." They are: Absolute Black, Antimatter Blue Metallic, Area 51, Carbonized Gray Metallic, Cyber Orange Pearl, Fighter Jet Gray, Iconic Silver Metallic, Lucid Red Pearl, Oxford White, and Race Red. Admittedly, color swatches on a touchup site will be inexact replicas of the color on the sheetmetal seen in sunlight. The rendering above from the FullSizeBronco forum shows Cyber Orange Pearl, for instance, which is only an approximation of the Automotive Touchup swatch depending on where you look.

Still, reaction to the color choices has been about as muted as the palette itself, many wondering why there aren't obviously adventurous colors and a more exciting blue. Seven of the 10 colors look like they channel a German car configurator's penchant for 50 shades of gray. Two others are shades of red, the last a shade of red mixed with yellow. Contrast this with the year 1969, when Ford offered 28 colors for the Bronco including Caribbean Turquoise, Yucatan Gold, Twilight Green Poly, and Chrome Yellow. There were seven blues among those 28, from Reef as the lightest to Harbor as the darkest. Between 1966 and 1971, Ford offered more than 40 colors for the Bronco, from the vibrant and straightforward Sonora Lime and Antique Bronze Poly to the inscrutable Norway, Cordova, and Empire.

The Ford Ranger, built in the Michigan Assembly Plant where the Bronco will be manufactured, offers nine colors, but two that Bronco fans would probably love to get: Lightning Blue and the copper-ish Saber. If it's any consolation, the 15 color swatches that Automotive Touchup posted for the 2021 Ford F-150 exhibit the same dearth of exuberance, with the exception of Kodiak Brown Metallic and a more lively Velocity Blue. You can add paint to the list of questions for next month's Bronco reveal.